I’ve been talking with some friends who do live streaming events about putting together a show in LA that would have a small live audience, and a potentially unlimited global audience, through streaming. It would be sort of like An Evening With Kevin Smith, but it would be with me. I’ll read a few passages from my books, including unreleased material from All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, and then I’ll do a little Q&A from the Internet and the live audience. I think we’re going to aim for like a $5 ticket price to watch the live stream, and the show would be in the neighborhood of two hours.
I want to hear from you and I want you to tell me if you’re interested. If there’s enough interest from different time zones (like Europe, where it could potentially be in the middle of the night when I’m live in LA) I would do a show that’s at like 11am in LA, but 8pm or whatever in Europe.
I beg your patience and understanding during the coming weeks, because I’m going to ask this over and over again to make sure as many people as possible know about it. You’re going to see reposts here, on Tumblr, on Instagram, and on my blog.
For a show like this to be successful in person, I’d need to sell out a house of like 800 people, so I need to hit at least that many people online to feel like it’s worth it, but I’m also cautiously optimistic about the potential for a global audience over 1000 people.
SO: I think $5 seems fair. Am I undervaluing myself? Should I make it like $7 or $10? That seems high to me, but what do I know.
If this works, I would be totally into doing shows every month, inviting artists who I think you’ll dig, so they can earn some money, and build their audience.
H*ck, if this really does work, it could be something truly special and memorable for lots of people! I feel silly thinking big, but why not think big? I’d love to start something that grows into a really awesome showcase for my work, and other people (musicians, comedians, storytellers) who I want to bring to a larger audience than they have right now.
a lot of young people say that fanfic made them think abuse was okay, and I think it’s disingenuous to say they’re all lying. but why is this suddenly a problem? this is my theory as to why it’s no longer an understood thing that fandom is about fiction & fantasy.
really good stuff
I’ve said it before– if young people are getting their primary education on consent and sexual relationships from fandom they have already been failed.
And I say this as someone who got my primary education on consent and sexual relationships from fandom, and for whom it worked out pretty well. I mined a ton of good stuff out of fandom and discussions around fandom. But the fact that there was a void of education in my life that I had to fill on my own is not on fandom. That’s on society and rape culture and our puritanical education system.
[First post is screenshots of a twitter thread; here’s the text of it.]
something I think about a lot is how fandom talks to each other.
i suppose that’s obvious, but not just the antagonistic vitriol. the hyper-ramps of joy feedback can produce similarly hyperbolic language.
almost a year ago I got a multi-comment ask from an anti who told me that ‘bad ships’ almost led them into some real life abusive situations in her dating life. I didn’t respond because I wanted to think about it. and while the framework of my feelings was formed 1 month later–
–I’ve been fleshing that out ever since. because she’s not alone in saying this happened – she read smutfic and later felt her impressions were screwed up by them – but why? why is this suddenly a complaint?
and i think it has a lot to do with evolving internet culture interacting poorly with fandom culture and young people looking for easy answers to complicated questions. for instance:
-young women&/or afab people grow up with specific toxic messages targeted at them about sex/purity
a lot of shit mixes together & it’s not weird for afab people to be disgusted by their body &/or come away with dark sex/violence mishmashes brewing in the hindbrain. may or may not be kinks later, but like. USians, think about how sex & violence (towards afab/women) is tied together.
(transphobia adding a WHOLE NEW FUN LEVEL to this, too. trans (&nb) people 10,000% included in this, in case it’s not clear to anyone.) -all the taboo around expressing sexual ideas, esp if you’re not a cis man, makes it hard to express yourself. -then fandom: mostly afab, full of kink
-majority afab and/or women, kink-friendly fandom functions like a release valve for a lot of people. & though it was never explicitly said by anyone I remember, there was always a kind of understanding this was the case: a safe place for women/afab people to be crass and sexual–
–objectifying fictional characters instead of being objectified, exploring sexual fantasies in safe spaces, etc etc. people in fandom would express filthy ideas & wants! it was afab people &/or women being as frank & open about their fantasy lives as cis men could be everywhere else.
but it was also understood that everything in fandom was fictional. like: of course rape is bad, nobody wants rape to happen, but fantasies are fantasies. live it out on a fictional character who can’t be hurt! good way to blow off some steam.
& because this was understood, people talked about kinks – some really taboo, some things that would be very harmful or abusive or illegal irl – without restraint or qualifications. they weren’t needed! fandom was for fiction. say the gross thing, nobody’s judging!
and that was all well and good as long as we were all working off the same context: fandom is for fiction. this is where we put stuff that’s not safe irl. but.
but.
tumblr.
tumblr is a viral sharing platform. every post you make can be boosted independent of its original context. & when you remove all this frank, salacious, unqualified talk about fictional characters from the context of ‘it’s fiction’ and ‘it’s not for rl for good reason’: well.
fandom got visible on tumblr in a new way. tumblr dropped the barriers to entering fandom. and starting in 2012/2013, tumblr entrants had grown up in a world where the internet had been around *their whole lives*. 9/11 happened when they were a /fetus/.
and 2011-2013 fandom tumblr is an unholy, indistinct mix of real life activism, awareness, and …. posts about how sexy Dave Strider is. in exactly the same kinds of tones we used on lj, in fandom-only – fiction-only – spaces.
I can see how baby fans got the wrong idea.
without necessarily knowing it was happening, fandom – in moving to tumblr – went from a delineated safe space for non-cis-male sexual fantasy indulgence to being – for newcomers at least – indistinguishable from the sexual noise they grew up with, except probably more appealing.
losing shared context by being diluted on tumblr means young people could encounter fandom fantasy content independent of the ‘we let it hang out here b/c we’re not allowed to otherwise’ subtext. Mixed well with the much nastier toxic messages of rl & mass media & get a nasty mess.
i don’t want to spoil the punchline, but the reason non-cis-men are more in need of a safe space retreat than cis men is b/c of misogyny. so you’ll never guess what happened when fandom’s version of that space got diluted into pop culture!
(radfems! also misogyny.)
2012/13 tumblr gets a 1-2 punch: structural patriarchy: women who openly like sex are dirty sluts! they raise & teach kids how to be good adults! they’re pure! radfems: women who openly like kinks are feeding into female oppression! women teach women to be good adults! they’re pure!
2012/12 tumblr recognizes the structural punch, kinda, but disguised as Girl Power, they don’t see the second one coming. Bam! fandom – mostly made up of afab people and/or women – is suddenly awful for letting itself be sexually expressive! it abandoned the teaching post!
softened up by structural oppression of non-cis-(straight-white)-male sexuality, young fandom went down like a stone to the idea that women should be teaching other women how to be good women and Good Women Don’t Do Kinks Or Men (add heaping tablespoons of transphobia/racism/etc)
this got out of hand like always, god. but long story short: young fandom didn’t – doesn’t – see how society sets them up for abusive relationships, sexual disasters, and toxic predation. so they look back at fandom – in dialogue with all that grossness – and conclude:
‘the people in fandom failed me.’ – fandom was supposed to teach them how to be safe – society tells them that’s the job of ‘women’. but fandom wasn’t being a mom, and therefore if they weren’t safe it was fandom’s fault.
these people who were abused using fandom as a tool, or feel like they were vulnerable because of fanworks: fanfic didn’t make them that way. it just feels natural to blame it because it’s hard to see the power structure you live in, and it’s hard to admit to being helpless.
the fanworks are easy to point to and blame because they’re fiction. It’s the same reason video games were easy to blame for violence. it feels so clean and straightforward, and it doesn’t require dismantling a whole power system – a whole culture – to get rid of.
but it’s not the fiction.
(here’s the hard part.)
if fandom contributed to the toxic messages about sexuality absorbed by younger members, it’s because of continuing to talk about fictional characters like we were in those old, delineated ‘fantasy only/it’s just fiction’ spaces–
– after the shift to tumblr. and frankly, tumblr is not that kind of delineated space: it’s also an activist space (or was one), and an awareness space.
non-cis-male sexual fantasies about fictional characters & rl social activism/awareness do not mix well, as we’ve seen.
and that contribution was a small, small part, probably: fandom is so queer, so non-cis, so non-straight, so disabled and neurodivergent that our influence on everything but tumblr is really small.
but because we’re not a power structure, we’re easy to point to & tear down.
and we’ve been trained by society to blame our troubles on those we can get at and hurt instead of blaming the very way our cultures are built. hurting other vulnerable people is easy. dismantling the earth under our feet is hard. (why do u think radfems focus on fixing women?)
to wrap up: fandom isn’t perfect by a long shot, and one thing we can do to protect ourselves from harm is assume the best of others and try to put things we see into context.
we can also fuck up white cis male patriarchy instead of each other. (screw the system.) /end
Just a reminder that posts that are anti-sex positivity (not posts that have critiques towards how some in the movement have implemented it and layouts of what it should stand for but just flat out mockery and insistance that it’s a bad concept in general) are almost always by radfems.
Cuz I just saw one cross my dash, and the whole idea that sex positivity is some horrible ‘libfem’ nonsense is very much radfem rhetoric.
And just a reminder that most of these people who call themselves ‘sex negative’ and consider themselves opposing sex positivity are anti-kink and anti-sex work.
Because, like. On the one hand it’s just fun and funny and silly in the way we want Spidey to be- him being young and naive enough to take a command (like “You’re an adult in the Jewish community now” farther than it’s maybe intended.
But on the other hand, this is exactly what’s intended. Superheroes- at least, the best ones- are basically the living embodiment of “If not me, then who?” They’re trying to make the world a better place than it was. And that is the responsibility of any Jewish adult. Peter getting bit by a radioactive spider and saying “Well, shit, looks like my only option is tikkun olam” is SUCH A FUCKING RIDICULOUSLY JEWISH CHOICE.
Like- if Peter was already comfortably Spidey in Civil War, in the MCU he had to be pretty close to his Bar Mitzvah when he became Spider-man. Which means that it happened right in that time where you’re taking the idea of what b’nai mitzvot means super seriously. You’re suddenly expected to view the world as something you can fix. You’re considering what it means that you’re suddenly an adult, and that you have these new responsibilities, and how can you live up to them.
In that context, with great power comes great responsibility isn’t just about being a superhero, it’s also about being called to the bimah, and permission to read the Torah, and the ability to join a minyan. In that context, developing fucking spider powers must feel like a sign of how being a Jewish adult encompasses so much more than you could ever imagine, both in terms of pivilege and in terms of obligations.
Maybe “Spider-boy” could walk past someone who needs help, but “Spider-man” could not. In choosing that name, Peter is unequivocally embracing the power and burden of Jewish adulthood.
NO BUT GUYS.
Consider:
Peter’s congregation does not, officially, know that he’s Spider-man. It is definitely his secret identity and that has not been breached, he is VERY SECRETIVE, etc.
Except.
Except that they’re a community and they all know about the tragedy that took his parents, and then to lose his Uncle Ben (z’’l) on top of that.
When he started acting odd, they all thought it was grief, made it a point to keep an eye on him.
When he started asking questions about the morality of certain things- they took notice.
The way he disappeared some afternoons, even if there was a youth group meeting (and he used to be pretty good about attending those when he didn’t have clubs after school), and those always happened to be the same day Spidey footage showed up on YouTube.
The way he’s always offering to run errands and just happens to be able to do things faster than anyone else can.
The way Spider-man doesn’t seem to work on Shabbas unless there is something that really cannot be solved without him.
They see the Bugle articles about him and, as a community, reject them. The rabbi says it in his sermon: Spider-man is not a menace, he is a mensch.
In the pews, Peter Parker’s sigh of relief is loud, and everyone pretends not to hear it.
Peter asking his religious school teacher REALLY BIZARRELY POINTED QUESTIONS. Peter bringing up weird fringe Jewish theories he found on Reddit and YouTube and being like “Is this true though? IF I GOT BITTEN BY A SNAKE-” “Peter, did you get bitten by a snake? Forget religious concerns, do we need to take you to the hospital?” “DO NOT TAKE ME TO THE HOSPITAL”
Man, but this is actually a really interesting question! Because health and well-being takes priority over basically everything else in Jewish tradition, how does developing superpowers factor into that? Are they enhancing health and well-being, or compromising it? If it’s the former, would doing things to support superpowers be considered not just good because helping people is a mitzvah but also because it is using his body the way it was intended? By biting Peter, did the radioactive spider inadvertently perform a great service in more ways than one?
“Do aliens count as life? Would killing them bring repercussions upon me? Hypothetically speaking.”
“Am I a bad Jew if I teamed up with a non-Jew, like a…a spider or a gentile god or a sentient raccoon or something in order to fight said aliens? Hypothetically speaking.”
“Could non-kosher animals that perform a good service for a Jew be rewarded? In what ways?”
“Is it Jewish of me to get the urge to crawl into a ceiling corner and wait for flies?”
“What if I could help people, but the way in which I helped them didn’t match up with Judaism? I could follow Jewish teachings, but then I’d be helping less people…”
I think what I love most about this is that so many of these questions have halachic precedent, some even in our world, but ESPECIALLY in the MCU.
Because you know that the second Tony Stark stepped up to that mic in 2008 and said “I am Iron Man,” Jewish scholars started EXPLODING with discussions and hypotheticals about this new world they were suddenly occupying.
Plus, by the time Pete was bitten by the spider, the Chitauri attack already happened, which means rabbis in New York were at the FOREFRONT of figuring out what the shit is going on with their world and how that intersects with Jewish custom.
I’m unclear if SHIELD being infiltrated by Hydra ended up known or if they covered at least some of it up, but if it was public knowledge, that is such a huge additional thing for Jews- that this group historically associated with the Nazis is not just still around, but infiltrating the highest aspects of government. I think that would fundamentally change how Jews approach superheroes and superpowers. In fact, I think that would be a pretty big topic in youth groups and in religious classes, both dealing with kids’ fears and figuring out how to make the ones who AREN’T scared realize how deadly serious the whole situation is. And that, in and of itself, would probably change Peter’s response to becoming Spider-man; the great responsibility of it takes on new resonance in that climate.
… I need to look up that midrash or folktale or whatever it was about King David (before he was king, I’m pretty sure) asking God why He created spiders and scorpions because they seem so useless and harmful, and God doesn’t answer but before the week is out David gets his life saved by a spider and a scorpion in quick succession
because somebody needs to tell Peter that midrash at some point
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 